Complacency is not the enemy.
I have been reading a lot here about how the Dems are getting too cocky. About how the polls have given us a victory disease and how we’re counting our chicks before they’re hatched. Again and again posters and diarists have admonished us to remember 2004 and how we all thought we were going to win and how horrible it felt when we didn’t.
The thing is that I don’t think complacency was the problem back then. I don’t recall anyone saying "you know, Kerry has this thing in the bag. I think I’ll kick back and have a few brews rather than going and voting."
We are not going to lose because of apathy and complacency.
Let me repeat that.
We are not going to lose because of apathy and complacency.
The GOP has exactly one hope. They want to suppress the vote, game the system with rigged machines, and then spin a story about McCain’s incredible come from behind victory to prevent too much scrutiny into their theft of yet another election. They are going to be telling us how the "Bradley effect" is responsible for the wild discrepancy between exit polls and official vote tallies. They are going to be telling us that their GOTV efforts were just a lot better than anyone had anticipated. They are going to tell us that Americans just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for an untested man with foreign roots in this time of crisis. They are going to do what they always do. They are going to lie and lie and lie.
What they need for this to work is a party of losers as their opponents. They need a party of people who, no matter how well things are going, think their best course of action is to start fretting like a bunch of nervous ninnies and try to scare one another with horror stories about the dangers of overconfidence. They need people accustomed to losing. They need people who expect to blow their lead and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They need people who harbor a nagging fear that they just can’t do it, who greet every piece of good news with mixed emotions and foolish nonsense about "peaking too early" or "getting way too confident."
And we are helping them.
All of these doomsday scenarios are NOT helping our side. They are helping theirs. They are NOT doing a damned thing toward chasing off this hypothetical bugbear of overconfident complacent Democrats, something I have never seen once in my entire life no matter how many times I have been warned about them. What they are doing is undermining our confidence. What they are doing is setting us up to expect failure AGAIN. What they are doing is psychologically preparing us for a letdown that will only make it that much easier for the GOP to steal this election as they have done in the past.
Not. This. Time.
We are going to win.
Just get used to the idea.
We are going to clean their clocks. The only way they can beat us is to cheat. If we don’t believe that, if we don’t regard that as an article of unquestioned faith, then when they do cheat and try to steal this election we are not going to react with the incandescent rage that is the only thing that will stop them from trying to steal what is ours. They will not fear our righteous indignation. They will expect us to wail and whine and gnash our teeth and to start blaming all of those mythical "overconfident Democrats" who blew our lead.
We are going to win. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. If you don’t believe that, then you’ll believe that it is possible for us to lose. And that is exactly what the Republicans need you to believe to steal our victory.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t continue to work, to donate, to do everything that we can to swamp them and reduce their party to irrelevance. What I am saying is that if we don’t believe that we are capable of doing that, if we don’t believe that a landslide victory is not only possible but will be the inevitable result of our efforts, then we will never achieve it and we will be giving our enemies a weakness to exploit when they try to tell us that their guy won.
They absolutely NEED us to believe that we can lose.
Stop helping them.
We are going to win.
Say it. Believe it. Work for it.
Then make it happen.